Memories and Portraits, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Chapter XV. A Gossip on Romance

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and
voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled
with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be
eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat
itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye. It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our
books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood. Eloquence and thought, character and conversation, were but
obstacles to brush aside as we dug blithely after a certain sort of incident, like a pig for truffles. For my part, I
liked a story to begin with an old wayside inn where, “towards the close of the year 17-,” several gentlemen in
three-cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of mine preferred the Malabar coast in a storm, with a ship beating to
windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean proportions striding along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate. This
was further afield than my home-keeping fancy loved to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than the
tales that I affected. Give me a highwayman and I was full to the brim; a Jacobite would do, but the highwayman was my
favourite dish. I can still hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night and the coming of day
are still related in my mind with the doings of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw; and the words “post-chaise,” the “great
North road,” “ostler,” and “nag” still sound in my ears like poetry. One and all, at least, and each with his
particular fancy, we read story-books in childhood, not for eloquence or character or thought, but for some quality of
the brute incident. That quality was not mere bloodshed or wonder. Although each of these was welcome in its place, the
charm for the sake of which we read depended on something different from either. My elders used to read novels aloud;
and I can still remember four different passages which I heard, before I was ten, with the same keen and lasting
pleasure. One I discovered long afterwards to be the admirable opening of what will he do with it: it was no
wonder I was pleased with that. The other three still remain unidentified. One is a little vague; it was about a dark,
tall house at night, and people groping on the stairs by the light that escaped from the open door of a sickroom. In
another, a lover left a ball, and went walking in a cool, dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted windows and the
figures of the dancers as they moved. This was the most sentimental impression I think I had yet received, for a child
is somewhat deaf to the sentimental. In the last, a poet, who had been tragically wrangling with his wife, walked forth
on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night and witnessed the horrors of a wreck. 5
Different as they are, all these early favourites have a common note — they have all a touch of the romantic.

5 Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gallery of
Charles Kingsley.

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance. The pleasure that we take in life is of two
sorts — the active and the passive. Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny; anon we are lifted up by
circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and dashed we know not how into the future. Now we are pleased by our conduct,
anon merely pleased by our surroundings. It would be hard to say which of these modes of satisfaction is the more
effective, but the latter is surely the more constant. Conduct is three parts of life, they say; but I think they put
it high. There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not immoral, but simply a-moral; which either does not
regard the human will at all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy relations; where the interest turns, not upon
what a man shall choose to do, but on how he manages to do it; not on the passionate slips and hesitations of the
conscience, but on the problems of the body and of the practical intelligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the shock
of arms or the diplomacy of life. With such material as this it is impossible to build a play, for the serious theatre
exists solely on moral grounds, and is a standing proof of the dissemination of the human conscience. But it is
possible to build, upon this ground, the most joyous of verses, and the most lively, beautiful, and buoyant tales.

One thing in life calls for another; there is a fitness in events and places. The sight of a pleasant arbour puts it
in our mind to sit there. One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early rising and long rambles in the dew.
The effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean, calls up
in the mind an army of anonymous desires and pleasures. Something, we feel, should happen; we know not what, yet we
proceed in quest of it. And many of the happiest hours of life fleet by us in this vain attendance on the genius of the
place and moment. It is thus that tracts of young fir, and low rocks that reach into deep soundings, particularly
torture and delight me. Something must have happened in such places, and perhaps ages back, to members of my race; and
when I was a child I tried in vain to invent appropriate games for them, as I still try, just as vainly, to fit them
with the proper story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses
demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots again seem to abide their destiny,
suggestive and impenetrable, “miching mallecho.” The inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green garden and
silent, eddying river — though it is known already as the place where Keats wrote some of his Endymion and
Nelson parted from his Emma — still seems to wait the coming of the appropriate legend. Within these ivied walls,
behind these old green shutters, some further business smoulders, waiting for its hour. The old Hawes Inn at the
Queen’s Ferry makes a similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, apart from the town, beside the pier, in a climate
of its own, half inland, half marine — in front

the ferry bubbling with the tide and the guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the old garden with the trees.
Americans seek it already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who dined there at the beginning of the
Antiquary. But you need not tell me — that is not all; there is some story, unrecorded or not yet complete,
which must express the meaning of that inn more fully. So it is with names and faces; so it is with incidents that are
idle and inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like the beginning of some quaint romance, which the all-careless
author leaves untold. How many of these romances have we not seen determine at their birth; how many people have met us
with a look of meaning in their eye, and sunk at once into trivial acquaintances; to how many places have we not drawn
near, with express intimations — “here my destiny awaits me” — and we have but dined there and passed on! I have lived
both at the Hawes and Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, of some adventure that should justify
the place; but though the feeling had me to bed at night and called me again at morning in one unbroken round of
pleasure and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. The man or the hour had not yet come; but some day, I
think, a boat shall put off from the Queen’s Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night a horseman, on a
tragic errand, rattle with his whip upon the green shutters of the inn at Burford. 6

6 Since the above was written I have tried to launch the boat
with my own hands in Kidnapped. Some day, perhaps, I may try a rattle at the shutters.

Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively literature has to count. The desire for knowledge, I
had almost added the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit and striking incident. The
dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell, himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play; and
even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, at once enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the
great creative writer shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of common men. His stories may be
nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to
obey the ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of place; the right
kind of thing should follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but all the circumstances in a
tale answer one to another like notes in music. The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a
picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps
the story home like an illustration. Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting over against the Trojans,
Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian running with his fingers in his ears, these are each culminating moments in
the legend, and each has been printed on the mind’s eye for ever. Other things we may forget; we may forget the words,
although they are beautiful; we may forget the author’s comment, although perhaps it was ingenious and true; but these
epoch-making scenes, which put the last mark of truth upon a story and fill up, at one blow, our capacity for
sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the
impression. This, then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought, or emotion in some act or
attitude that shall be remarkably striking to the mind’s eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to do in words; the
thing which, once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality
of epics. Compared with this, all other purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical or the purely philosophic,
are bastard in nature, facile of execution, and feeble in result. It is one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or
to describe scenery with the word-painters; it is quite another to seize on the heart of the suggestion and make a
country famous with a legend. It is one thing to remark and to dissect, with the most cutting logic, the complications
of life, and of the human spirit; it is quite another to give them body and blood in the story of Ajax or of Hamlet.
The first is literature, but the second is something besides, for it is likewise art.

English people of the present day 1882 are apt, I know not why, to look somewhat down on incident, and
reserve their admiration for the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to write a
novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one. Reduced even to the lowest terms, a certain interest can
be communicated by the art of narrative; a sense of human kinship stirred; and a kind of monotonous fitness, comparable
to the words and air of Sandy’s Mull, preserved among the infinitesimal occurrences recorded. Some people
work, in this manner, with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope’s inimitable clergymen naturally arise to the mind in this
connection. But even Mr. Trollope does not confine himself to chronicling small beer. Mr. Crawley’s collision with the
Bishop’s wife, Mr. Melnotte dallying in the deserted banquet-room, are typical incidents, epically conceived, fitly
embodying a crisis. Or again look at Thackeray. If Rawdon Crawley’s blow were not delivered, Vanity Fair would
cease to be a work of art. That scene is the chief ganglion of the tale; and the discharge of energy from Rawdon’s fist
is the reward and consolation of the reader. The end of Esmond is a yet wider excursion from the author’s
customary fields; the scene at Castlewood is pure Dumas; the great and wily English borrower has here borrowed from the
great, unblushing French thief; as usual, he has borrowed admirably well, and the breaking of the sword rounds off the
best of all his books with a manly, martial note. But perhaps nothing can more strongly illustrate the necessity for
marking incident than to compare the living fame of Robinson Crusoe with the discredit of Clarissa
Harlowe. Clarissa is a book of a far more startling import, worked out, on a great canvas, with
inimitable courage and unflagging art. It contains wit, character, passion, plot, conversations full of spirit and
insight, letters sparkling with unstrained humanity; and if the death of the heroine be somewhat frigid and artificial,
the last days of the hero strike the only note of what we now call Byronism, between the Elizabethans and Byron
himself. And yet a little story of a shipwrecked sailor, with not a tenth part of the style nor a thousandth part of
the wisdom, exploring none of the arcana of humanity and deprived of the perennial interest of love, goes on from
edition to edition, ever young, while Clarissa lies upon the shelves unread. A friend of mine, a Welsh
blacksmith, was twenty-five years old and could neither read nor write, when he heard a chapter of Robinson
read aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that moment he had sat content, huddled in his ignorance, but he left that farm
another man. There were day-dreams, it appeared, divine day-dreams, written and printed and bound, and to be bought for
money and enjoyed at pleasure. Down he sat that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned to borrow the book.
It had been lost, nor could he find another copy but one that was in English. Down he sat once more, learned English,
and at length, and with entire delight, read Robinson. It is like the story of a love-chase. If he had heard a
letter from Clarissa, would he have been fired with the same chivalrous ardour? I wonder. Yet
Clarissa has every quality that can be shown in prose, one alone excepted — pictorial or picture-making
romance. While Robinson depends, for the most part and with the overwhelming majority of its readers, on the
charm of circumstance.

In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the pictorial, the moral and romantic interest,
rise and fall together by a common and organic law. Situation is animated with passion, passion clothed upon with
situation. Neither exists for itself, but each inheres indissolubly with the other. This is high art; and not only the
highest art possible in words, but the highest art of all, since it combines the greatest mass and diversity of the
elements of truth and pleasure. Such are epics, and the few prose tales that have the epic weight. But as from a school
of works, aping the creative, incident and romance are ruthlessly discarded, so may character and drama be omitted or
subordinated to romance. There is one book, for example, more generally loved than Shakespeare, that captivates in
childhood, and still delights in age — I mean the Arabian Nights — where you shall look in vain for moral or
for intellectual interest. No human face or voice greets us among that wooden crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and
beggarmen. Adventure, on the most naked terms, furnishes forth the entertainment and is found enough. Dumas approaches
perhaps nearest of any modern to these Arabian authors in the purely material charm of some of his romances. The early
part of Monte Cristo, down to the finding of the treasure, is a piece of perfect story-telling; the man never
breathed who shared these moving incidents without a tremor; and yet Faria is a thing of packthread and Dantes little
more than a name. The sequel is one long-drawn error, gloomy, bloody, unnatural and dull; but as for these early
chapters, I do not believe there is another volume extant where you can breathe the same unmingled atmosphere of
romance. It is very thin and light to be sure, as on a high mountain; but it is brisk and clear and sunny in
proportion. I saw the other day, with envy, an old and a very clever lady setting forth on a second or third voyage
into Monte Cristo. Here are stories which powerfully affect the reader, which can he reperused at any age, and
where the characters are no more than puppets. The bony fist of the showman visibly propels them; their springs are an
open secret; their faces are of wood, their bellies filled with bran; and yet we thrillingly partake of their
adventures. And the point may be illustrated still further. The last interview between Lucy and Richard Feveril is pure
drama; more than that, it is the strongest scene, since Shakespeare, in the English tongue. Their first meeting by the
river, on the other hand, is pure romance; it has nothing to do with character; it might happen to any other boy or
maiden, and be none the less delightful for the change. And yet I think he would be a bold man who should choose
between these passages. Thus, in the same book, we may have two scenes, each capital in its order: in the one, human
passion, deep calling unto deep, shall utter its genuine voice; in the second, according circumstances, like
instruments in tune, shall build up a trivial but desirable incident, such as we love to prefigure for ourselves; and
in the end, in spite of the critics, we may hesitate to give the preference to either. The one may ask more genius — I
do not say it does; but at least the other dwells as clearly in the memory.

True romantic art, again, makes a romance of all things. It reaches into the highest abstraction of the ideal; it
does not refuse the most pedestrian realism. Robinson Crusoe is as realistic as it is romantic; both qualities
are pushed to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does romance depend upon the material importance of the incidents.
To deal with strong and deadly elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is to conjure with great names, and, in the
event of failure, to double the disgrace. The arrival of Haydn and Consuelo at the Canon’s villa is a very trifling
incident; yet we may read a dozen boisterous stories from beginning to end, and not receive so fresh and stirring an
impression of adventure. It was the scene of Crusoe at the wreck, if I remember rightly, that so bewitched my
blacksmith. Nor is the fact surprising. Every single article the castaway recovers from the hulk is “a joy for ever” to
the man who reads of them. They are the things that should be found, and the bare enumeration stirs the blood. I found
a glimmer of the same interest the other day in a new book, The Sailor’s Sweetheart, by Mr. Clark Russell. The
whole business of the brig Morning Star is very rightly felt and spiritedly written; but the clothes, the
books and the money satisfy the reader’s mind like things to eat. We are dealing here with the old cut-and-dry,
legitimate interest of treasure trove. But even treasure trove can be made dull. There are few people who have not
groaned under the plethora of goods that fell to the lot of the Swiss Family Robinson, that dreary family.
They found article after article, creature after creature, from milk kine to pieces of ordnance, a whole consignment;
but no informing taste had presided over the selection, there was no smack or relish in the invoice; and these riches
left the fancy cold. The box of goods in Verne’s Mysterious Island is another case in point: there was no
gusto and no glamour about that; it might have come from a shop. But the two hundred and seventy-eight Australian
sovereigns on board the Morning Star fell upon me like a surprise that I had expected; whole vistas of
secondary stories, besides the one in hand, radiated forth from that discovery, as they radiate from a striking
particular in life; and I was made for the moment as happy as a reader has the right to be.

To come at all at the nature of this quality of romance, we must bear in mind the peculiarity of our attitude to any
art. No art produces illusion; in the theatre we never forget that we are in the theatre; and while we read a story, we
sit wavering between two minds, now merely clapping our hands at the merit of the performance, now condescending to
take an active part in fancy with the characters. This last is the triumph of romantic story-telling: when the reader
consciously plays at being the hero, the scene is a good scene. Now in character-studies the pleasure that we take is
critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at incongruities, we are moved to sudden heats of sympathy with courage,
suffering or virtue. But the characters are still themselves, they are not us; the more clearly they are depicted, the
more widely do they stand away from us, the more imperiously do they thrust us back into our place as a spectator. I
cannot identify myself with Rawdon Crawley or with Eugene de Rastignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear in common with
them. It is not character but incident that woos us out of our reserve. Something happens as we desire to have it
happen to ourselves; some situation, that we have long dallied with in fancy, is realised in the story with enticing
and appropriate details. Then we forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in
our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then only, do we say we have been reading a romance. It is
not only pleasurable things that we imagine in our day-dreams; there are lights in which we are willing to contemplate
even the idea of our own death; ways in which it seems as if it would amuse us to be cheated, wounded or calumniated.
It is thus possible to construct a story, even of tragic import, in which every incident, detail and trick of
circumstance shall be welcome to the reader’s thoughts. Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is
there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life; and when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join
in it with all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when he loves to recall it and dwells upon its
recollection with entire delight, fiction is called romance.

Walter Scott is out and away the king of the romantics. The Lady of the Lake has no indisputable claim to
be a poem beyond the inherent fitness and desirability of the tale. It is just such a story as a man would make up for
himself, walking, in the best health and temper, through just such scenes as it is laid in. Hence it is that a charm
dwells undefinable among these slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills the mountains with his note; hence, even
after we have flung the book aside, the scenery and adventures remain present to the mind, a new and green possession,
not unworthy of that beautiful name, The Lady of the Lake, or that direct, romantic opening — one of the most
spirited and poetical in literature — “The stag at eve had drunk his fill.” The same strength and the same weaknesses
adorn and disfigure the novels. In that ill-written, ragged book, The Pirate, the figure of Cleveland — cast
up by the sea on the resounding foreland of Dunrossness — moving, with the blood on his hands and the Spanish words on
his tongue, among the simple islanders — singing a serenade under the window of his Shetland mistress — is conceived in
the very highest manner of romantic invention. The words of his song, “Through groves of palm,” sung in such a scene
and by such a lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the emphatic contrast upon which the tale is built. in Guy
Mannering, again, every incident is delightful to the imagination; and the scene when Harry Bertram lands at
Ellangowan is a model instance of romantic method.

“I remember the tune well,” he says, “though I cannot guess what should at present so strongly recall it to my
memory.” He took his flageolet from his pocket and played a simple melody. Apparently the tune awoke the corresponding
associations of a damsel. She immediately took up the song —

“ ‘Are these the links of Forth, she said;

Or are they the crooks of Dee,

Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head

That I so fain would see?’

“‘By heaven!’ said Bertram, ‘it is the very ballad.’”

On this quotation two remarks fall to be made. First, as an instance of modern feeling for romance, this famous
touch of the flageolet and the old song is selected by Miss Braddon for omission. Miss Braddon’s idea of a story, like
Mrs. Todgers’s idea of a wooden leg, were something strange to have expounded. As a matter of personal experience,
Meg’s appearance to old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins of Derncleugh, the scene of the flageolet, and the Dominie’s
recognition of Harry, are the four strong notes that continue to ring in the mind after the book is laid aside. The
second point is still more curious. The, reader will observe a mark of excision in the passage as quoted by me. Well,
here is how it runs in the original: “a damsel, who, close behind a fine spring about half-way down the descent, and
which had once supplied the castle with water, was engaged in bleaching linen.” A man who gave in such copy would be
discharged from the staff of a daily paper. Scott has forgotten to prepare the reader for the presence of the “damsel”;
he has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead
of trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not
merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad narrative besides.

Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it is one that throws a strong light upon the subject of this paper. For
here we have a man of the finest creative instinct touching with perfect certainty and charm the romantic junctures of
his story; and we find him utterly careless, almost, it would seem, incapable, in the technical matter of style, and
not only frequently weak, but frequently wrong in points of drama. In character parts, indeed, and particularly in the
Scotch, he was delicate, strong and truthful; but the trite, obliterated features of too many of his heroes have
already wearied two generations of readers. At times his characters will speak with something far beyond propriety with
a true heroic note; but on the next page they will he wading wearily forward with an ungrammatical and undramatic
rigmarole of words. The man who could conceive and write the character of Elspeth of the Craigburnfoot, as Scott has
conceived and written it, had not only splendid romantic, but splendid tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he could
so often fob us off with languid, inarticulate twaddle?

It seems to me that the explanation is to be found in the very quality of his surprising merits. As his books are
play to the reader, so were they play to him. He conjured up the romantic with delight, but he had hardly patience to
describe it. He was a great day-dreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and humorous visions, but hardly a great artist;
hardly, in the manful sense, an artist at all. He pleased himself, and so he pleases us. Of the pleasures of his art he
tasted fully; but of its toils and vigils and distresses never man knew less. A great romantic — an idle child.